Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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The stars are aligning (or it might be more accurate to say that seasoned ground beef and the Jolly Roger are colliding) this week to give us a rare opportunity to address this puzzler: Do pirates eat chili? More specifically, do pirates eat Kiwanis chili? The pirates in question are, of course, “The Pirates of Penzance.” They have been on a quest of capturing hearts in eastern New Mexico since Eastern New Mexico University’s production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera o...
Some of my earliest and happiest memories are of wriggling into place on the prickly green velvet seats in Eastern New Mexico University’s old theater and waiting for the lights to dim and the curtains to go up each February for the annual production of the school’s long-running variety show, “Swanee.” Curtain time back then was 8 p.m. I remember my mother insisting my brothers and I attempt to take afternoon naps ahead of the show. I was always too excited to sleep. It was...
It’s been a little over two years since Jaden Isler became head coach of the Elida girls’ basketball team, a promotion that came about for the saddest of reasons: The death of then-head coach J.D. Isler — Jaden’s father — in an auto accident north of Clovis on Jan. 11, 2015. The younger Coach Isler was working as his father’s assistant with the Elida Lady Tigers at the time. After his dad’s passing, he went on to lead the talented Elida squad to its fifth straight stat...
To local 4-H kids, Janie Hardin was affectionately known as “the pig lady,” remembered for the flowered rubber boots she wore in the pig-washing stalls at the fairs, and her endless kindness to the children she encountered during the 25 years she worked at the New Mexico Christian Children’s Home, and as a longtime leader of the Shooting Stars 4-H Club. Hardin died Jan. 24 in Portales, but her son Stephen hopes her legacy to children will continue with a scholarship fund...
Dora School science teacher Laura Wilbanks is not a superstitious type, but Friday the 13th might be her new favorite day. She was working late at the school following a teacher in-service on our most recent Friday the 13th when she received email notice that a team of juniors in her environmental science class had been named one of the 16 teams to receive $10,000 in the Lexus Eco Challenge. That’s a national contest for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) s...
If your social calendar has an opening on Jan. 27, you’ll be hard-pressed to find better entertainment and a more worthy cause than the “Black Hats and Pearls” dinner and dance fundraiser for the Food Bank of Eastern New Mexico. Eastern New Mexico University’s collegiate chapter of the Future Farmers of America is sponsoring the event, which features a sit-down dinner in Eastern’s Campus Union Ballroom, followed by an evening of toe-tapping, boot-scootin’ western swing music...
My relationship with a local newspaper began only a few days after I was born, an event recorded in a yellowed clipping from an old Portales News-Tribune. It announced that Mrs. Jim Williamson (because women didn’t have first names back in those days) had given birth to a girl. That clipping is one of a flurry of others that have accumulated over the decades like fall leaves in the corners of our cabinets: weddings, obituaries, graduations, stories about family members, p...
Today marks the last day of the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count, a mammoth citizen science effort to keep track of numbers and species of birds across half the globe, and one that has happened, believe it or not, for the last 117 years. Thanks to Grant Beauprez, a lesser prairie chicken biologist with the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish stationed for the past decade in eastern New Mexico, local birders are part of that effort. It is one of the nicest traditions of t...
This week between Christmas and New Year’s Day — a time when we seem to take a collective sigh of relief — always makes me think back to the late Decembers of my youth. I was never a particularly crafty child (in the Hobby Lobby sense of the word), but I usually received at least one gift that enabled me to create completely useless items to be foisted off onto others. Two stick in my mind. In a display of highly questionable judgment, Santa brought me a knitting machi...
I was in the Dora School auditorium in 2009 for a student assembly when I heard a familiar voice behind me — a voice I'd heard many mornings on the radio, often engaged in light-hearted banter, but always one of the first to have information on local weather, school closings, happenings in the community. I turned around and introduced myself to Steve Rooney. I had met his wife Julie and the four kids ahead of that, but had not yet crossed paths in person with Steve. His daught...
In a way, it was Zakary Brock’s love of movies that landed him on the stage at Clovis Community College’s Town Hall in this week’s production of “Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge.” The play, which opened Wednesday night, is the culmination of the semester-long company theater class taught by Christy Mendoza. Zak, a 22-year-old student from Portales, had taken Christy’s film class last spring, and he says Christy talked him into taking the theater class this fall. He ag...
As Christmas lights go up, and rehearsals are under way for various local holiday-related functions, this is the time of year when I always remember a long-gone friend and neighbor, Rowena Preuit. Every small community needs an igniter, a person who makes sure traditions are observed and that events get on the calendar and actually happen. In the south Roosevelt County community of Milnesand, Rowena Preuit was that person for much of my life. She and her husband, Top, were...
If you're in need of a dose of holiday cheer, or on the hunt for some "one-size-fits-all, never-needs-dusting" gifts for friends, family, or colleagues, I have good news: Eastern New Mexico University and Clovis Community College have some offerings on tap that will fit the bill, and the first one is tonight. Eastern's annual holiday concert is at 7 p.m. today in the ballroom at the Campus Union Building, 1500 S. Ave. K, Portales. A cornucopia of ensembles from the school's...
On this day of giving thanks, I am especially grateful today to some neighbors all of us in eastern New Mexico happen to share: the men and women stationed at Cannon Air Force Base. I am not exaggerating when I say that the used book sale conducted last week by the Friends of the Portales Public Library could not have happened without our Cannon volunteers. This is the third year that our small but loyal group of library supporters was supplemented (by which I mean "saved")...
Oh, those heartbreaking images from the storm-ravaged Midwest. The nearest brush I have had with a tornado (and the nearest I hope I ever have) was 20 years ago. As the twister roared by east of us, baseball-sized hail decimated the roofs of every building we owned and shattered every north-facing pane of glass. We huddled inside our living room with a terrified, slobbering dog. A close encounter makes you wary of storms for the rest of your life. Some years later on a sweltering summer afternoon when our daughter was young,...
Oh, those heartbreaking images from the storm-ravaged Midwest. The nearest brush I have had with a tornado (and the nearest I hope I ever have) was 20 years ago. As the twister roared by east of us, baseball-sized hail decimated the roofs of every building we owned and shattered every north-facing pane of glass. We huddled inside our living room with a terrified, slobbering dog. A close encounter makes you wary of storms for the rest of your life. Some years later on a sweltering summer afternoon when our daughter was young,...
We have a young composer in our midst with a name to remember: Franklin Piland. At the annual ENMU Pops Concert on Saturday night, Franklin conducted the premiere performance of a piece he wrote for the event, a rousing opener called "Flourishes and Mechanations." An enthusiastic ovation rewarded the 2008 graduate of Muleshoe High School who will receive his degree in music performance in May from Eastern New Mexico University. Franklin is a prolific composer with a number of completed works and many more in progress. "I...
Fifty years ago this week, Alexander's New Mexico Drug in Portales was gearing up for the "cough 'n' cold season" with a special on electric blankets — $12.95. Food Town — "in the beautiful new Sands Shopping Center" — had coffee for 59 cents a pound. "Homegrown yams" were two pounds for a dollar. Photo by Gordon Greaves, courtesy of Tish McDaniel A group of Campfire girls enjoy the campfire pit and Oasis pond during the early 1970s in this view of the park looking west. The group shelter is barely visible in the middle of th...
More than a few of us wondered if a Roosevelt County Fair could happen without Lillie Belle Toombs. Lillie Belle, who died early this month at the age of 90, "was the heart of the Home Arts building" for seven decades of Roosevelt County Fairs, according to Connie Moyers, our local extension home economist. Diane Lieb, superintendent of the Home Arts building, said Lillie Belle "exemplified what the county fair was meant to be." In her prime, Lillie Belle had dozens of entries each year: Rows of canned goods, quilts, baked it...
The mid-August aroma of fried food and sawdust, blended with the earthy fragrance of pigs, cattle, sheep and horses, takes me back in an instant to the county fairs of my childhood. We feasted on hamburgers made by Floy Wilbanks and Ida Mae Zimmerman at the American Legion concession stand, fueling ourselves for repeat raids of the Merchants' Building in search of yardsticks and rain gauges. Cotton candy came in only one color — pink — and it was made fresh while we waited, a warm cloud of sugar spun in a giant galvanized tub... Full story
When my less-than-blazing speed was duly noted by the Dora track coach 35-plus years ago, I was sent with the other slow-pokes to the old baseball field, supplied with a softball, a shot put and a discus, and condemned to "field events." My lifelong ineptitude for throwing a softball surfaced quickly, but I could hold my own putting a shot, and I was actually reasonably good at hurling a discus. So was born an obsession. Four-time Olympic gold champion Al Oerter became my hero. I convinced my parents that I needed my own... Full story
When my less-than-blazing speed was duly noted by the Dora track coach 35-plus years ago, I was sent with the other slow-pokes to the old baseball field, supplied with a softball, a shot put and a discus, and condemned to "field events." My lifelong ineptitude for throwing a softball surfaced quickly, but I could hold my own putting a shot, and I was actually reasonably good at hurling a discus. So was born an obsession. Four-time Olympic gold champion Al Oerter became my hero. I convinced my parents that I needed my own... Full story
On my bookshelf I have a small softbound volume called New Mexico Handbook, written in 1989 by Stephen Metzger. While it's a fairly useful reference book, I've kept it for a single quirky paragraph that straddles pages 222 and 223, about the drive from Lovington to Portales. "Imagine a gorgeous waterfall plummeting 500 feet off a mountain cliff into a pool of clear water," Metzger writes. "Imagine lush vegetation, cool breezes, and balmy evenings. Now keep that image in mind as you drive across this barren stretch of desert...
She doesn't use a cell phone and she's never had a credit card, but put 96-year-old Lois Cantrell in front of an organ or piano, and she can still hold her own with the best of them. Lois was the organist at First United Methodist Church in Portales for close to 50 years, according to current organist Bill Wood, who took over the keys and pedals in 1990. While she rarely performs in public these days, she did an hour-long funeral service at the church last week, offering the family of Ila Jean Clark the comforting embrace of...
There's an African proverb that says, "When an old man dies, a library burns down." It honors the loss of a lifetime of memories, experiences, lessons, and stories. But for my dear friend, Richard Lambirth, the proverb might need to be rewritten. Richard died early this month, after a lifetime of seriously collecting books, many reflecting his love of history and the American West. When he learned more than a year ago that he had a fatal illness, Richard and his wife, Bettye, immediately set about cataloging his vast... Full story
